I guess I thought my points about total utilitarianism were relevant, because ‘we can make people like us more by pushing back more against misrepresentation’ is only true insofar as the real views we have will not offend people. I’m also just generically anxious about people in EA believing things that feel scary to me. (As I say, I’m not actually against people correcting misrepresentations obviously.)
I don’t really have much sense of how reasonable critics are or aren’t being, beyond the claim that sometimes they touch on genuinely scary things about total utilitarianism, and that it’s a bit of a problem that the main group arguing for AI safety contains a lot of prominent people with views that (theoretically) imply that we should be prepared to take big chances of AI catastrophe rather than pass up small chances of lots of v. happy digital people.
On Torres specifically: I don’t really follow them in detail (these topics make me anxious), but I didn’t intend to be claiming that they are a fair or measured critic, just that they have decent technical understanding of the philosophical issues involved and sometimes puts their finger on real weaknesses. That is compatible with them also saying a lot of stuff that’s just false. I think motivated reasoning is a more likely explanation for why they says false things than conscious lying, but that’s just because that’s my prior about most people. (Edit: Actually, I’m a little less sure of that, after being reminded of the sockpuppetry allegations by quinn below. If those are true, that is deliberate dishonesty.)
Regarding Gebru calling Will a eugenicist. Well, I really doubt you could “sue” over that, or demonstrate to the people most concerned about this that he doesn’t count as one by any reasonable definition. Some people use “eugenicist” for any preference that a non-disabled person comes into existence rather than a different disabled person. And Will does have that preference. In What We Owe the Future, he takes it as obvious that if you have a medical condition that means if you conceive right now, your child will have awful painful migraines, then you should wait a few weeks to conceive so that you have a different child who doesn’t have migraines. I think plenty ordinary people would be fine with that and puzzled by Gebru-like reactions, but it probably does meet some literal definitions that have been given for “eugenics”. Just suggesting he is a “eugenicist” without further clarification is nonetheless misleading and unfair in my view, but that’s not quite what libel is. Certainly I have met philosophers with strong disability rights views who regard Will’s kind of reaction to the migraine case as bigoted. (Not endorsing that view myself.)
None of this is some kind of overall endorsement of how the ‘AI ethics’ crowd on Twitter talk overall, or about EAs specifically. I haven’t been much exposed to it, and when I have been, I generally haven’t liked it.
I guess I thought my points about total utilitarianism were relevant, because ‘we can make people like us more by pushing back more against misrepresentation’ is only true insofar as the real views we have will not offend people. I’m also just generically anxious about people in EA believing things that feel scary to me. (As I say, I’m not actually against people correcting misrepresentations obviously.)
I don’t really have much sense of how reasonable critics are or aren’t being, beyond the claim that sometimes they touch on genuinely scary things about total utilitarianism, and that it’s a bit of a problem that the main group arguing for AI safety contains a lot of prominent people with views that (theoretically) imply that we should be prepared to take big chances of AI catastrophe rather than pass up small chances of lots of v. happy digital people.
On Torres specifically: I don’t really follow them in detail (these topics make me anxious), but I didn’t intend to be claiming that they are a fair or measured critic, just that they have decent technical understanding of the philosophical issues involved and sometimes puts their finger on real weaknesses. That is compatible with them also saying a lot of stuff that’s just false. I think motivated reasoning is a more likely explanation for why they says false things than conscious lying, but that’s just because that’s my prior about most people. (Edit: Actually, I’m a little less sure of that, after being reminded of the sockpuppetry allegations by quinn below. If those are true, that is deliberate dishonesty.)
Regarding Gebru calling Will a eugenicist. Well, I really doubt you could “sue” over that, or demonstrate to the people most concerned about this that he doesn’t count as one by any reasonable definition. Some people use “eugenicist” for any preference that a non-disabled person comes into existence rather than a different disabled person. And Will does have that preference. In What We Owe the Future, he takes it as obvious that if you have a medical condition that means if you conceive right now, your child will have awful painful migraines, then you should wait a few weeks to conceive so that you have a different child who doesn’t have migraines. I think plenty ordinary people would be fine with that and puzzled by Gebru-like reactions, but it probably does meet some literal definitions that have been given for “eugenics”. Just suggesting he is a “eugenicist” without further clarification is nonetheless misleading and unfair in my view, but that’s not quite what libel is. Certainly I have met philosophers with strong disability rights views who regard Will’s kind of reaction to the migraine case as bigoted. (Not endorsing that view myself.)
None of this is some kind of overall endorsement of how the ‘AI ethics’ crowd on Twitter talk overall, or about EAs specifically. I haven’t been much exposed to it, and when I have been, I generally haven’t liked it.